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Larry Pressler was born in 1942 and raised on a South Dakota farm, where 4-H sent him to Cairo in 1961 and a national citizenship award brought him to meet John F. Kennedy in 1963. He led the student association at the University of South Dakota, studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and earned a Harvard master's in public administration, then enlisted in the Army and served in Vietnam from 1966 t...

Lyndon B. Johnson was born in 1908 in a farmhouse on the Pedernales River in Texas and went without a first name for three months while his parents argued over it. Arriving in Washington in 1931 as secretary to Congressman Richard Kleberg, he effectively ran the office and took over the Little Congress, a club for congressional aides, by organizing mailroom clerks, elevator operators and typists i...

Kelly Ayotte was born in Nashua, New Hampshire, in 1968, attended Penn State and Villanova Law, and joined the state attorney general's office as a line prosecutor in 1998. She worked on the 2001 Dartmouth College murders, became deputy attorney general, and in 2004 was appointed by Governor Craig Benson as New Hampshire's first woman attorney general. Democratic Governor John Lynch reappointed he...

Kamala Harris was born in Oakland, California, in October 1964 to Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian biomedical scientist who spent 40 years in breast cancer research, and Donald J. Harris, a Jamaican born economist who became the first Black scholar tenured in Stanford's economics department. After her parents divorced when she was seven, she lived in Urbana, Evanston and Madison, visited her grandfathe...

Joseph Manuel Montoya was born on September 24, 1915, in Peña Blanca, New Mexico, to Roman Catholic parents descended from 18th century Spanish settlers. He graduated from Bernalillo High School in 1931, attended Regis College in Denver, and in 1934 moved to Washington, D.C., to study at Georgetown Law. In 1936, at 21 and still a law student, he became the youngest person ever elected to the New M...

Jon Kyl was born in Oakland, Nebraska, in 1942 and grew up in Iowa, where his father, John Henry Kyl, served in Congress. He earned his undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Arizona, where he edited the Arizona Law Review, and worked as a lawyer and lobbyist in Phoenix and Denver before winning Arizona's 4th District House seat in 1986. There he backed the 1987 Abandoned Shipwrecks Ac...

John Sherman Cooper was born in 1901 in Somerset, Kentucky, to the town's wealthiest family, captained the Yale basketball team, joined Skull and Bones and went on to Harvard Law. In 1924 his father died and the fortune proved gone, so he left Harvard, passed the bar on his own, and spent 20 years paying family debts and his six siblings' college costs. As Pulaski County judge during the Depressio...

John Randolph of Roanoke was born in 1773 into the Bland and Randolph families of Virginia, a distant cousin of Thomas Jefferson who claimed descent from Pocahontas. His father died when he was a toddler, and his stepfather, judge St. George Tucker, reportedly abused him. A youthful case of tuberculosis, or possibly Klinefelter syndrome, left him beardless with a soprano voice, and he relied on op...

John Edwards was born Johnny Reid Edwards in South Carolina in 1953 and grew up in a North Carolina mill town, where his father worked in a textile mill and his mother ran an antique business and carried mail. The first in his family to attend college, he studied textile technology at North Carolina State and law at the University of North Carolina, where he met Elizabeth. As a trial lawyer he won...

John J. Crittenden was born in Kentucky in 1787 to a Revolutionary War veteran, became attorney general of the Illinois Territory at 22, and served as an aide at the Battle of the Thames in the War of 1812. Governor Isaac Shelby appointed him to the U.S. Senate in 1814 at 27, below the constitutional minimum age, so he returned to the Kentucky legislature and became speaker. In the Old Court and N...

John Lester Hubbard Chafee (1922 to 1999) was born in Providence into a Rhode Island political family that included governors, senators and his uncle Zechariah Chafee, a Harvard Law free speech scholar. He left Yale after Pearl Harbor to enlist as a Marine private, turned 20 during the battle of Guadalcanal, fought at Okinawa, and after Harvard Law was recalled for Korea, where he commanded a rifl...

John Breaux was born in Crowley, Louisiana, in 1944, earned his bachelor's degree in Lafayette in 1964 and a law degree from LSU in 1967, and went to work for Representative Edwin Edwards. When Edwards was elected governor, Breaux won the 1972 special election for his seat at 28, becoming the youngest member of the House, and served there until 1987. Elected to the Senate in 1986 as a Southern Dem...

Jim Webb was born in Missouri in 1946 into a military family with Scots-Irish roots; his father flew B-17 and B-29 bombers in World War II and cargo planes in the Berlin Airlift. After graduating from the Naval Academy in 1968, he led a Marine platoon in Vietnam, earned the Navy Cross, Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts, and was medically retired because of his wounds. He earned a...

Jean Carnahan was born Jean Anne Carpenter in Washington, D.C., in 1933 to a plumber and a hairdresser. She sat next to future husband Mel Carnahan at Anacostia High School and worked her way through George Washington University, graduating in 1955 as the first in her family to finish high school. They married in 1954 and settled in Rolla, Missouri, in 1959, where she drafted speeches and press re...

James Mountain Inhofe (1934 to 2024), Oklahoma's longest serving U.S. senator, was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and moved to Tulsa in 1942, where his father was an insurance executive. He sold blackberries as a boy, set a school record in a mile relay, was drafted into the Army in the late 1950s, and later led his father's insurance business. His official biography long listed a 1959 University of Tu...

James G. Blaine was born in Pennsylvania in 1830 to a Whig father and an Irish Catholic mother, in a home where the daughters were raised Catholic and the sons Presbyterian. After teaching in Kentucky, where he met his wife Harriet, he moved to Maine in 1853, bought the Kennebec Journal with borrowed money, and used it to promote the new Republican Party. He rose to Speaker of the Maine House, ent...

James Buchanan, the 15th president, was born in a Pennsylvania log cabin in 1791 to an Irish immigrant father. Nearly expelled from Dickinson College for vandalism and tavern hopping, he was readmitted after his pastor pleaded his case and graduated with honors, then built a lucrative law practice. In 1819 his fiancée, Anne Caroline Coleman, broke off their engagement amid rumors about his motives...

Jake Garn was born in Richfield, Utah, in 1932, the son of a World War I pilot. After a business and finance degree from the University of Utah in 1955, he flew Martin P-5M Marlin flying boats for the Navy and then KC-97L and KC-135A tankers in the Utah Air National Guard, retiring as a colonel with 17,000 flight hours. He served on the Salt Lake City Commission, was elected mayor in 1972, led the...

Eating is banned on the Senate floor, yet since 1965 a stash of candy has sat in a desk on the Republican side. It began with George Murphy, a one term California Republican and former song and dance man from films such as Broadway Melody of 1940 and For Me and My Gal, who kept sweets in his desk. In 1968 he moved to the last row desk on the right side of the aisle beside the east door, next to th...

Howell Heflin was born in June 1921 in Poland, Georgia, and raised in Alabama by a Methodist minister father and a schoolteacher mother, in a family that included his great uncle, Representative Robert Stell Heflin, and his uncle, Senator James Thomas Heflin, a vocal champion of white supremacy. He joined the Marine Corps in 1942, fought in the Pacific at Bougainville and Guam, and earned the Silv...

Cloture, called closure in many Commonwealth countries and the guillotine in the United Kingdom and Australia, takes its name from the French word clôture. The modern rule was forged in 1881, when Charles Stewart Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party used endless amendments and speeches to block Prime Minister William Gladstone's Protection of Person and Property Bill during the Land War. Afte...

Abscam began in March 1978 as an art theft and stolen property sting run by agent John Good out of the FBI's Hauppauge office on Long Island. The Bureau enlisted convicted swindler Melvin Weinberg, who with girlfriend Evelyn Knight received probation in exchange for designing the front. Agents created Abdul Enterprises, placed $1 million in a Chase Manhattan account, and posed as wealthy Arab shei...

Wallace F. Bennett was born in Salt Lake City in 1898, majored in English and lettered in debate at the University of Utah, and served as an infantry instructor in World War I. In 1920 he started as an office clerk at his father's Bennett's Paint and Glass Company and worked up through cashier, production manager and sales manager to president in 1938. He also organized a Ford dealership, hosted a...

Key Pittman was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1872, tutored privately, and studied law at Southwestern Presbyterian University, now Rhodes College. In 1897 he left law for the Klondike Gold Rush and worked as a miner until 1901, then moved to the silver boomtown of Tonopah, Nevada, in 1902. He lost a nonbinding 1910 popular vote for the Senate to Republican George S. Nixon, but after Nixon di...

This episode traces the filibuster from its roots to its modern forms. The word descends from the Dutch vrijbuiter and Spanish filibustero, meaning freebooter or plunderer, and was applied in the 1800s to American adventurers such as William Walker before it came to mean legislative obstruction. In 60 BCE Cato the Younger talked until dusk to block Julius Caesar's request to run for consul in abse...